Chris Davis talks about quitting Twitter: 'Not my cup of tea'

Orioles slugger Chris Davis closed his Twitter account before the Orioles' last series of the first half -- simply because he said social media wasn’t his thing.

“I gave it about a year. I told [PR director Monica Barlow] I’d try it for a year and see how I felt about it. It wasn’t my cup of tea.”

The timing was a bit curious for Davis, the league’s current home run leader. He closed his account right before participating in the All-Star Game and the Home Run Derby -- events that Major League Baseball has promoted as social-media friendly. It was just time, he said.

“There was no correlation with any time of the year or anything like that,” Davis said. “I tried it for about a year and it just wasn’t something I was into.”

Davis wasn’t a particularly active Twitter user -- not like his teammate Adam Jones, one of the more prolific tweeters in pro sports. Davis used his account mainly to tweet bible verses, though he said he interacted with fans when he could.

One of his fan interactions in the first half garnered some national attention. A teenaged fan asked Davis, who has hit 37 homers this season, if he used steroids. Davis responded with a “No,” and that set off a firestorm of analysis. One person tweeted that Davis must be using performance-enhancing drugs since he didn’t use a period in his response -- leaving his ‘No’ open-ended.

Davis was far from amused by the dissection of his one-word answer on social media, but he said the occasional negativity he experienced didn’t lead to closing his account.

“For every nine positive things, you get one negative thing,” he said. “I’ve had a great following and a lot of support on Twitter. But it’s just not something I cared to indulge in anymore.”